We had been excited for weeks about the Phinney/Greenwood Neighborhood Yard Sale day. Excited because we consider it to be our “spring opener,” kicking off the yard sale season into high gear. Excited because it is usually one of our best days of the whole year. And a little extra excited because last year, it was the first sale we ever wrote about after starting up this blog. That’s right, Yard Sale Bloodbath is one year old … happy blogaversary to us!

So on Friday morning, I was disturbed to find an e-mail from Meghan saying “RAIN MIXED WITH SNOW. WTF???” That was the forecast for Saturday, which was alarming … especially since the previous Saturday was sunny and over 70 degrees. I didn’t want to believe it, and in the afternoon it looked like it was getting nicer, but by 6 p.m. we had full on snow. For real. In April. (You can see some pictures from the neighborhood here.) It was really not looking good for sales the next day. We figured unless we were completely snowed in we’d go check it out, but we didn’t have high hopes.

Saturday morning it actually looked OK! It was cloudy and about 36 degrees out, but the snow had melted away, and it seemed like it might just clear up. We headed out a bit early and started driving around the neighborhood. By now we have been going to the same people’s sales year after year, and our first stop was one we both remembered from years past, in a covered outdoor garage. Meghan picked up a pile of cool stuff. I made just one purchase: a pair of ugly gloves for fifty cents that I could not get on my quickly-freezing hands fast enough.

I had marked off certain sales that sounded promising, but a lot of them weren’t happening after all … big surprise. Most of the sales were in garages or otherwise sheltered. But some of them had their stuff out on the street. Which was too bad, because pretty soon it was raining.

We headed for a block which always has good sales. I loved this mannequin propped up outside a garage. Her head was cut off oddly on a slant (that you can’t really see in the photo) for reasons no one could really figure out.

Across the street, Meghan claimed the woman brings out the exact same stuff year after year. I believed her, but I couldn’t specifically recognize anything … until I saw this shot glass palette, which I completely remember checking out last year. Crazy.

By the time we left this block, it was full on snowing. It sucked, but it was sort of worth it to laugh at the fact that we were actually going to yard sales in the snow — a first, even for us. We kept driving around, stopping at plenty of lame sales that we normally would have passed by. Beggars can’t be choosers, right?

The snow situation was getting a little ridiculous so we decided to try and find the indoor rummage sales. Even these didn’t seem to be happening in some of the usual places. We did find one which was a benefit for the boy scouts. There was bagpipe music playing and nothing we wanted to buy.

Next we hit a really great sale a little off the beaten path. It was in a garage and they had all kinds of fun vintage things. A woman was hemming and hawing over whether to get this amazing Adam and Eve gravel painting. She ended up buying it, but let us snap a picture before she took it to its new home.

The people there had great midcentury kitsch stuff, like these bathroom fishes and seahorses. Cute!

I got a ’50s planter, two vintage pillowcases, and a Christmas Mambo CD. Meghan got a huge pile of really great books and CDs.

I know this isn’t a blog about the weather, but it was so odd that I have to keep talking about it. For a while there it was super sunny, but still snowing. Then it clouded up and the snow turned to rain, but somehow it felt even more freezing cold than when flakes were coming down. It was at this point that we hit the street where everyone seemed to have the idea to put tarps down over their stuff.

There was one sale with piles of intriguing clothes (under a series of tarps), but without my ugly gloves (left ’em in the car!) my hands were too frozen to even dig around. The guy there said he was having a hard time fishing change out of his pockets for the same reason.

Sadly, we agreed that it was time to call it a day. We had pretty much covered the area and it was really not fun to be outside anymore. There was just one more stop to make before we headed home: a moving sale at a weird church that we’d always kind of wondered about. Note that it wasn’t a church rummage sale; it was an actual moving sale. The buildings were being sold so they were vacating the premises.

The dark and musty basement was filled with a variety of crusty junk, including a row of pretty cool antique vanity tables. We didn’t buy anything.

All in all, it was definitely the most pathetic Phinney sale day we’ve ever been to, but we still ended up with some decent stuff. And I think we reached a new level of devotedness (and/or stupidity) when it comes to the things we’ll deal with to make the yard sale rounds.